The Mountain View company has dodged a lawsuit filed in March this year by KinderStart, a directory and search engine for information related to children, over the zero ranking the site was cataloged by in the Google index. The allegations against Google included predatory pricing, denial of free speech rights, premeditated elimination of the competitors and pervasive monopolistic practices.

Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose dismissed the lawsuit yesterday arguing that KinderStart didn't support with evidences its accusations as to Google's misconduct toward its competition. Although this was a set back for KinderStart, the company was granted the possibility to resubmit an amended case.

"The decision suggests that, if properly alleged, Google may be defaming a whole class of Web sites sacked with a '0' PageRank," said KinderStart attorney Gregory Yu. "If plaintiffs show Google manually tampered with even a single Web site's PageRank, Google's entire claim of 'objectivity' of search results and rankings could collapse."

In this context, Kinderstart's legal representative has announced that they will continue to fight Google and will enhance their efforts to turn the case into a class action lawsuit. Yu claims that the fact that none of the counts has been dismissed by the judge is the most important point of the case's dismissal and that an amended version of the case will be submitted prior to September 29 when the next court date was set.

Kinderstart claimed that it lost 70 percent of Internet traffic to the site in 2005 following an alteration introduced by Google to its ranking systems.